The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventor(s), to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
Storage Area Networks (SANs) provide a large amount of storage capacity that can be shared by numerous computing machines. The machines typically communicate with a SAN using the SCSI protocol by way of the internet (iSCSI) or a fibre channel connection. Often, the machine will include a SCSI interface card or controller that controls the flow of data between the machine and the SAN. To the machine, the SAN will appear as though it is locally connected to the operating system. Because all of the machines have access to the shared memory in the SAN, caching on the individual machines is often disabled to avoid difficulties in maintaining coherency among the caches on the various machines.